- City:
- Reading, PA
- Site Type:
- Infrastructure and Utilities, Water Supply
- New Deal Agencies:
- Public Works Funding, Public Works Administration (PWA)
- Started:
- 1938
- Completed:
- 1939
- Site Survival:
- No Longer Extant
Description
A reservoir serving Reading, Pennsylvania was constructed during the Great Depression with the aid of federal Public Works Administration (PWA) funds. The reservoir has since been demolished.
Reading Times: “[T]he new concrete reservoir on Mt. Penn, at the head of Green street … is 70 percent completed, with only 60 percent of the allotted time used up. September 26 is completion date, but it likely will be finished before that time. The basin is a PWA – sponsored project. The reservoir, which will hold 3,300,000 gallons, is of concrete, the sides heavily reinforced by concrete buttress walls on the inside. At close intervals on the inside will be columns two feet in diameter, supporting the eight – inch concrete roof. On the roof will be a layer of earth, four feet thick, to carry grass and shrubbery and eliminating one of the “white scars” on the mountain side. … With the nearby Buttonwood street reservoir, 900,000 gallons capacity, the new basin will have enough water in reserve for its high pressure district to meet the needs of 15,000 persons.”
PWA Docket No. X2140
Source notes
National Archives: Record Group 135: Public Works Administration; Projects Control Division; Entry 52: Indices to Non-Federal Projects; Report No. 5: Status of All Completed Non-Federal Allotted Projects, page 38. Reading Times, Jun. 8, 1939, pg. 4.Site originally submitted by Evan Kalish on September 7, 2015.
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